So they stayed not for sights, and stopped not for stone—nor breakfast, nor washing, nor even for their trunks, which had not materialized, but sat in a dusty railway carriage impatient for the train to start.
“It was beautiful,” remarked Jane, thinking of the harbour approach to the city.
“Yes,” said Peripatetica, jumping at her unexpressed meaning as usual. “Messina has always been a famous beauty, and always will be. But she is, and always has been, an incorrigible cocotte,—submitting without a struggle to every invader of Sicily in turn. And she certainly doesn’t in the least look her enormous age in spite of having led a vie orageuse. Whenever the traces of her past become too obvious she goes and takes an earthquake shock, they say, and rises fresh and rejuvenated from the ruins, ready to coquette again with a new master and be enticing and treacherous all over again.”[[1]]
[1]. Messina suffered a terrific earthquake shock in 1783 and has had in her history serious damage from seismic convulsions no less than nine times.
It was hard to imagine on her modern boulevards the armies of the past—all those many conquerors that Messina had herself called in, causing half the wars and troubles of Sicily by her invitations to new powers to come and take possession, and to do the fighting for her that she never would do for herself; betraying in turn every master, good or bad, for the excitement of getting a new one....
Greeks, Carthagenians, Mamertines, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards—where were the ways of their tramplings now? On that modern light-house point there was not even a trace of the Golden Temple in which Neptune sat on a crystal altar “begirt with smooth-necked shells, sea-weeds, and coral, looking out eastward to the morning sun?”
“If it were near the 15th of August I would stay here in spite of everything,” ventured Peripatetica, looking up from her book. “The Procession of the Virgin is the only thing really worth seeing left in Messina.” And in answer to Jane’s enquiring eyebrows Peripatetica began to read aloud of that extraordinary pageant of the Madonna della Lettera and her car, that immense float, dragged through Messina’s streets by hundreds of men and women; of its tower fifty feet high, on which are ranged tiers over tiers of symbolically dressed children standing upon all its different stories; poor babies with painted wings made to fly around on iron orbits up to the very top of the erection; of the great blue globe upon which stands a girl dressed in spangled gauze, representing the Saviour, holding upon her right hand—luckily supported by iron machinery—another child representing the Soul of the Blessed Virgin.
“Not real children—not live babies!” protested Jane.
“Yes, indeed, just listen to Hughes’ account of it.” Peripatetica read: “At an appointed signal this well-freighted car begins to move, when it is welcomed with reiterated shouts and vivas by the infatuated populace; drums and trumpets play; the Dutch concert in the machine commences, and thousands of pateraroes fired off by a train of gunpowder make the shores of Calabria re-echo with the sound; then angels, cherubim, seraphim, and ‘animated intelligences,’ all begin to revolve in such implicated orbits as to make even the spectators giddy with the sight; but alas for the unfortunate little actors in the pantomime; they in spite of their heavenly characters are soon doomed to experience the infirmities of mortality; angels droop, cherubim are scared out of their wits, seraphim set up outrageous cries, ‘souls of the universe’ faint away, and ‘moving intelligences’ are moved by the most terrible inversion of the peristaltic nerves; then thrice happy are those to whom an upper station has been allotted. Some of the young brats, in spite of the fracas, seem highly delighted with their ride, and eat their ginger-bread with the utmost composure as they perform their evolutions; but it not unfrequently happens that one or more of these poor innocents fall victims to this revolutionary system and earn the crown of martyrdom.”
Jane seized the book to make sure it was actually so written and not just one of Peripatetica’s flights of fancy, and plunged into an account of another part of the pageant—the giant figures of Saturn and Cybele fraternizing amiably with the Madonna; Cybele “seated on a large horse clothed like a warrior. Her hair is tied back with a crown of leaves and flowers with a star in front, and the three towers of Messina. She wears a collar and a large blue mantle covered with stars, which lies on the back of the horse. A mace of flowers in her right hand and a lance in her left. The horse is barded, and covered with rich trappings of red, with arabesques of flowers and ribbons.”...[[2]]